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 A Consortium Of Local Authors Pays Tribute To Allen Ginsberg. Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926--April 5, 1997), gay Buddhist, social and political activist, countercultural shaman, and one of the greatest and best loved American poets, died at 2:39 a.m. last Saturday. He suffered a heart attack related to incurable liver cancer. He was 70 years old. FOR THE LAST several days I've done little except read, several times, certain poems of Allen Ginsberg's. They are as outrageous, courageous, funny, endearing, generous and marvelous as ever. And I have heard stories. A story from my neighbor, a UA history professor from Newark (also Ginsberg's home town), of waiting at a bus station with Ginsberg in about 1968, Ginsberg kicking back and forth someone's discarded copy of a Webster's pocket dictionary. Ginsberg kicking the prescribed lexicon seems an appropriate image for someone who howled through all prescriptions for poetry in the mid-1950s and never stopped howling, always in support of liberation--poetic, sexual, political, philosophical. Artist Jim Waid remembers when Ginsberg visited Tucson in 1969, and at the home of Bill and Ann Woodin, engaged his former Columbia professor Joseph Wood Krutch in a conversation which seemed to make reference to all of the accumulated state of world knowledge. Joel Kuszai, Buffalo poet and publisher, remembers writing Ginsberg (who he didn't know at the time) with a complaint that the cost of a reading was beyond the affordability of young poets--a few days later he was surprised by a call from Ginsberg himself, and an offer of free tickets. Just as Ginsberg quite publicly enabled a discourse of liberation (he coined the term "flower power" in the 1960s), privately Ginsberg committed countless acts of random kindness. And more stories--Ginsberg with his harmonium singing William Blake poems, Ginsberg comforting poets in distress, Ginsberg setting off firecrackers in a Chinese hotel, Ginsberg being Ginsberg. Two nights ago I read the end of Howl for Carl Solomon to my 7-year old daughter Katherine, who listened attentively and then said, "Daddy, that's so sweet." Yes it is; yes he is. It was my pleasure to meet him in 1992 when I helped bring him to the Tucson Poetry Festival and hand-printed a poem of his, "Personals Ad," which was an ad for a lover. Ginsberg's comic delight in the world, and his ability to be perfectly honest and revealing about himself, was in clear evidence. There in the Chax Press studio signing broadsides, and later at the Tucson Convention Center giving a stirring reading to several hundred people, are the last I saw of him. He was one of the stars in the firmament, one of the brightest, and he will be missed. Poet and colleague Charles Bernstein writes, "How can one imagine life without Allen?"; and "Who will read and sing Blake for us now?" Certainly the best thing to do in remembering Allen Ginsberg is to read his work, and keep reading it. It's always more than we thought it was, never less than a delight and an education. Start with Howl and Other Poems, be sure to read Kaddish, and go from there to the other works as you will. But we have other ways of remembering as well. I have asked some Tucson (and a couple of Bisbee) writers and artists of varying ages, styles, and philosophies (Allen affected all of us) to share memory, story, appreciation, or poem. I have not tried to be exhaustive, as I know there are many more Tucsonans touched by Ginsberg and his work. My only hope is this might be a kind of sharing which the poet himself would have appreciated, although I also know full well he might have just lit a firecracker and said a Holy Holy and lit out for the cosmos; in fact, I guess that's what he did. Tucson artist Cynthia Miller dreamed on the night of April 7 that she was in a midnight parade in New York with thousands of people carrying candles; Allen Ginsberg was one of the thousands. He is gone--he is among us. --Charles Alexander, publisher, Chax Press PETER WARSHALL (biologist, editor, ecopoetics teacher): On the trail out of Ramsey Canyon, poets chatting louder than the flock of juncos, Allen sees a coatimundi. His first. Standing behind the creature, he appears out of place, hands dug deep in his metropolis trench coat, buckle and belt dangling, flapping his arms in his pockets as he searches the nooks and crannies for a crumb to toss. It's illegal to feed wildlife but my tongue is tied. Heros of sweetness, purifiers of desire, angels of loving kindness, healers of anxieties, voices of bardic hope need special, small waivers--especially here on Earth. Adiós amigo, happy trails. LESLIE MARMON SILKO (writer): Allen Ginsberg helped liberate American poetry from the clutches of white male academics, those usurpers of the proud tradition of Walt Whitman. Ginsberg is a big, generous spirit, alive and with us always in the words he sang and wrote. I traveled with a group of American writers who toured China for three weeks in 1984 as guests of the Chinese Writers Association. Our Chinese hosts always booked our rooms next to one another because Ginsberg and I were the only two American writers traveling alone. Unlike many poets and writers, he instantly put people at ease; for three weeks in China he was always cheerful and out-going, generous to everyone with his attention. When he sang after dinner the banquet room filled with fun, so the Chinese people adored him immediately though he spoke no Chinese. He was full of mischief on our group's last night in China. Allen lighted a string of firecrackers in the fancy, carpeted conference room of the new, five-star hotel to liven things up so our farewells to China and our Chinese hosts would not be gloomy; maybe he thought the tone of our farewell party a bit too stuffy. That was the last time I saw Allen Ginsberg, smiling and happy, not the least bit concerned about the singed spots on the fancy carpet. That was when I thought maybe he was a reincarnation of some old Zen poet-priest. KEN BACHER (poet, Buddhist): I first encountered Howl in 1961 in Colorado Springs where I had gone impulsively to visit the head cheerleader from Scottsdale High School, who had moved there in the late Spring of our Junior year. The day I arrived, she left with her family for the weekend, and I was cast adrift in a strange town, lonely and forelorn. I took refuge in the bookstore on the square and found Howl, which was unknown in Arizona at the time. I spent the whole weekend reading and re-reading it. It was not until 1987 that I met Allen Ginsberg, at a conference at Columbia University where he gave a reading. He looked like any other aging college prof, but when he began to read, he was transformed into the raging poet I'd encountered in his work a quarter century before. WILL INMAN (poet, social activist): (written in 1964) Allen Ginsberg, the revolutionary Poet who uttered the most pertinent social cry of our times ("Fuck America and her Goddamn Atom Bomb!"), stood beside me singing, slightly off key, "The Star Spangled Banner," as a school band played the anthem slowly, then rocking gently as the Puerto Rican anthem was played. Ginsberg chided some of us quietly for our over-zealous hoots and laughs at certain speakers, urging us to give each man a fair hearing.... Does this mean that Allen Ginsberg is going soft? I would say no. I believe that this man whose own zeal helped him cut through the muck of our social order is now taking another, deeper look into our possibilities. Is it not possible that the same Poet-prophet who warned us with a terrible negation of our emptiness might now be one, if not the one, to find us a challenge of spiritual and social affirmation? I saw Ginsberg show Ishmael Reed an ML edition of Leaves Of Grass and point out, in the back, Whitman's "Democratic Vistas," that most humane and terrible document of the American vision. Allen Ginsberg has been attacked by every entrenched and complacent mouth-zipper in America, including some very dear friends of mine and at times by me. But he needs no defense. His work generates his spirit. You who do not like his songs, sing better. What he has sung...has been, I feel, utterly, scourgingly, necessary and true.
DICK BAKKEN (poet, teacher, editor, activist): (April 23, 1969, Portland State College, Oregon) Resistance
Celebration with Robert Bly and others, Ginsberg (with mending
ribs) chording his red harmonium while chanting mantras and singing
William Blake with Peter Orlovsky: So many poetry and [Draft]
Resistance fans showed up that we had to read in two sets with
intermission between for changing crowds. As the celebration closed,
So Portland's not so bad after all, we grinned next morn(ing)--Ginsberg, Orlovsky, and I--wheeling merry out of Portland up Columbia gorge to eastern Washington. (Editor's note: See Ginsberg's version in "Northwest Passage," The Fall of America, City Lights Pocketbooks, 1972.)
ROADSIDE SUNSHINE MICHAEL CUDDIHY (poet, editor): When Howl first appeared, my brother Jack mailed me a copy. Here, I knew instantly, was the quintessential outsider, a sensibility which included all that poetry's genteel practitioners left out. And yet, there were echoes of Eliot's "sawdust restaurants" and "midnight cheap hotels" in Ginsberg's "negro streets" and "backyard green tree cemetary dawns." For both men, each word had to count. Ginsberg's is a poetry of nouns. A litany, really. What struck me most, however, was the burning intensity of his long coruscating lines, a rollercoaster of language. The same voltage carried over into "Kaddish" and would reappear intermittently. LISA COOPER (poet, editor): My parents took me to see Ginsberg read at Centennial Hall in the mid-1960s--my first time attending an event in the hall, then grandly deterioriated--wide, hollow, stained, with echo, with frayed velvet seats and every seat filled--men wearing beads and long hair; the long milling crowds in the aisles--stunned by what his presence DREW--a density so active I couldn't concentrate--more than the sum of sentences and rhythms--it was CULTURE--it acted UPON me--a marker in my lifelong reverence for bedraggled glory and large crowds of true weirdos AUGUST SCHAEFFER (poet, coffeehouse owner): Last Thursday, two days before Ginsberg's death, at the coffeehouse I co-own, we got to playing tapes of Ginsberg reading Howl simultaneously with a tape of Buddhist temple music. I kept remembering Martha, the valedictorian at the all-girl Catholic high school I went to, winning first place in the annual school talent contest, for her reading of Howl; and all the raging parents at special meetings in which the nuns and Jesuits who ran the school tried in vain to explain that the artistic merit of the piece outweighed all the four-letter words. And that same electric veering-out for me reading the sunflower poem at age 18. It sent a charge through this entire town when he and Orlovsky were announced as featured readers for the poetry festival in 1980. I still have the news clippings from that, arguments, accusations of censorship. So what if he only spoke to me at that festival when he wanted to get a bite of my hamburger--he had this EFFECT.... DAN FEATHERSTON (poet, student): Reading Howl & Other Poems as a teenager was an epiphany for me, vision of poetry as urgency: personal revelation, public revolution. Ginsberg's poetry led me to Blake, Whitman, Marx, Chaplin, Malcolm X, Buddha...endless entrances! Doorways into the big house of late-20th century planet news! Vision of poet as mindful of "whole symposium": atom bomb and juke box, Saigon and Wichita, Moloch and toothache--nothing too sacred, nothing too profane. Basho of 20th century America: wandering as wondering, surprise mind, transplanting Blake's Sunflower into tincan landscape of America. "America I've given you all and now I'm nothing." Now be the angel of all tomorrow's poetry. BECKY BYRKIT (poet, teacher): Allen Ginsberg and his magnificent dance was and is the installation of poetry in pre-apocalyptic America. Even the hummingbird recognizes Ginsberg as a bard and minister unsurpassed as completely and unapologetically demonstrative: he sang to us. As an animate and hyperarticulate documentarian of his craft, all poets and readers--the hungry, in other words--were his students, his contemporaries, and he loved us. Allen Ginsberg gave us permission, and demanded accountability. He was and is a zealot who praised his friends and held them holy, claimed their crystal and irrevocable moments in the history of the world and its letters, established poetry as the language for rendering that praise and thus taught the impossible: how to express your love. His is of a legend of authenticity and absolute gift. In our grief we hover with the hummingbirds: We are spinning on a paused world gone over to itinerant echo. DENNIS WILLIAMS (artist, poet, playwright, performer):
Goodbye you, goodbye me, Illustration by Joe Forkan |
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youngsters flung cherry blossoms all over Ginsberg and Orlovsky,
still chanting lustily, linked hands in a great snake and danced
cheering round the hall, in and out of doors, onto the stage--some
boys bare-chested, some girls open-bloused, tits flopping--until
it ended, Ginsberg stamping, banging his cane, and yelling, the
whole celebrating snake dropping hands and stomping and screaming
their lung's loudest and longest.
